"In a time of literary and cultural earthquakes, Sven Birkerts is an alert and humane first responder. Immersing yourself in these marvelously readable essays is like overhearing your smartest, most lucid friend's inmost thoughts about the life of writing, in which creative inwardness continues to engage our increasingly shifty world."
-David Gates
author of A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
"More open and liberating than a manifesto; unlike a rigid rule-book, relaxed and improvisatory, jazz-like. Genuinely exploratory and honest, this is a truly inspiring exercise in and about writing. Not only the book as a whole, each paragraph, from sentence to sentence!"
-Amitava Kumar
author of My Beloved Life: A Novel
"I love Sven Birkerts' essays-reading them feels like taking a walk with a friend, if that friend lets me tell him exactly what I wanted to hear about (structure, personas, author photos, Bob Dylan) and asks for nothing in return but my presence and my pleasure. This is an enveloping, insightful book about writing, thinking, all that 'inward sifting and shaping of experience, ' and what it means to be a self."
-Elisa Gabbert
author of Any Person Is the Only Self
"Birkerts' rich essays are at once exhilarating and revelatory, illuminating literature, language, photography and the world as we know it, and in ways entirely new. He raises urgent questions about our intellectual and aesthetic future."
-Claire Messud
author of This Strange Eventful History
